An introduction to Japanese linguistics By Natsuko Tsujimura (review)

872LANGUAGE, VOLUME 73, NUMBER 4 (1997) An introduction to Japanese linguistics. By Natsuko Tsujimura. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Pp. xiv, 401. Reviewed by Stanley Dubinsky, University ofSouth Carolina The latest in Blackwell's series 'Textbooks in linguistics', this volume is primarily designed for 'undergraduate students who are interested in Japanese linguistics' (xii). I found the book to be very clearly written and well organized. However, it suffers from trying to cover too much ground in its 401 pages and from trying to be of service to too wide an audience. The backcover blurb claims that the book can be used 'both as an introduction to Japanese linguistics for those who have no prior knowledge of linguistics and as a reference book on Japanese for linguists in general' (emphasis mine). It also claims to contain 'a comprehensive account of Japanese linguistics covering phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, language change, dialect variation, and gender differences' . Taking these claims at face value, I found that the text fails to live up to its own stated goals. Aimed at readers with widely differing abilities and interests, it fails to commend itself either to those with little or no background in linguistics or to those who come to it with a knowledge of linguistics wanting to be informed about issues particular to Japanese. Further, by including everything from phonetics to formal syntax-semantics to sociolinguistics, the book provides only nominal coverage on a number of issues (e.g. dialect variation), thereby sacrificing pages which would have better been used to expand upon the chapters (e.g. phonology) that are the core of the text. In preparing my review of this book, I was fortunate to have a Japanese graduate student from my university's psychology department who was interested in getting an introduction to the discipline of linguistics.1 This student, a native speaker of Japanese with no prior knowledge of linguistics, agreed to let me test the text's effectiveness by instructing her with it. It was not easy. A summary of her reactions to the text, given to me at the end of the semester, contained a variety of frustrations. In particular, she reported that the book lacked 'basic information necessary to guide naive readers through fundamental topics and issues in linguistics', that 'key terms are not always clearly defined', and that the chapters did not provide 'a general description of [each] subfield [of] linguistics' . She felt that 'the book should [have] treat[ed] the material at a more fundamental level', if it is intended for a beginning student. She also suggested that Overview and summary sections [for] each chapter [would have been] helpful'. Having used the text as a teaching tool, I find myself in agreement with her assessments. The first numbered chapter in the book, 'Introduction' (1-4), contains a brief description of the field of linguistics, with a standard homage to Chomsky's innateness theories drawn from first language acquisition research. The chapter would have been more useful and pertinent had it contained an overview of the goals of the book. The chapter on phonetics (5-22) contains descriptions of the phonetic inventories of English and Japanese, illustrated with very useful tables and diagrams. While phonetics need not be a major component of a survey course in linguistics, this chapter is far too abbreviated to be adequate preparation for the subsequent chapter on phonology (23-124). While quite interesting in many respects, this third chapter displays the problems described above. As an introductory text, it provides insufficient explanations ofkey concepts. For example, the relation ofphonology to phonetics, the difference between phonemic and phonetic transcription, and the definition of allophone are all dealt with in a single page (24). The definition of assimilation is given in a single sentence in a section on 'nasal assimilation' (29), and although a number of other assimilatory processes are discussed in the chapter, no attempt is made to generalize across these particular cases. As an advanced text, the chapter fares somewhat better, offering a clear and concise summary of a wide range of issues including sequential voicing (rendaku), mora vs. syllable, loan-word phonology, mimetics, and 1 1 am sincerely grateful to Sachiko Matsumoto for her...